When he was 14, a very bright young English boy named John Roy Robert Searl, who had an interest in electronics, was attempting to design a new type of generator. He built a device made of several metal plates and 12 magnetic rollers.

When finished, Searl was astounded when the oval plates began to turn, apparently without any outside influence. They soon were spinning faster and faster, until the device developed a field around itself then rose up from the table and struck the ceiling. When Searl took the device outside, it rose so high it disappeared in the clouds and was never seen again.

Searl became fascinated by his invention, which he called a levity disk. He made more of them. His goal was to find a way to control the disk so that once it took flight, he could bring it back to Earth. It took about 40 tries before he accomplished this.

His experiments were going on, incidentally, in 1944, during the last days of World War II. Searl made several attempts to introduce his invention to the world, even offering to give it to the Queen of England, but nobody was interested. His anti-gravity device, now called a Searl Effect Generator (SEG), was treated more like a novelty than an important scientific discovery.

A few years later, Russian scientist Eugene Podkletnov was testing a super conducting ceramic disk by rotating it above some powerful electromagnets. As the disk turned, Podkletnov noticed that small objects above the disk seemed to lose weight. He discovered that they seemed shielded from the pull of Earth's gravity. The weight reduction was small, only about two percent, but the discovery was so dynamic it launched the Russian into a new field of research.

By 1966, Podkletnov was about to publish an article on his findings in the British Journal of Physics-D, in which he claimed that gravity could be negated. Before the article appeared, however, a London newspaper found out about it, published Podkletnov's conclusions, and the skeptics went wild.

Podkletnov fell under such a severe rain of public ridicule he withdrew the article. The university where he worked evicted him. He went into self-produced exile.

Both of these scientists understood that anti-gravity devices could have a profound impact on our lives. They could lead to new and non-toxic methods of travel both on the planet and through space. Not only could we move about without burning costly fossil fuels, but we could stop polluting our world.

Both scientists claim, however, that they were confronted by great resistance from the power brokers with the financial means to use their discoveries and develop machines that might have changed the way the world does business.

Another great mind of that period, inventor Nicholi Tesla, is also believed to have developed a negative gravity device, as did researchers from Hitler’s labs in Nazi Germany. What they discovered has also remained locked in secrecy.

The reason was mostly financial. The coal and oil companies, automobile manufacturers and other special interests resisted this kind of change because there was too much money to be made by remaining on the course we were on.

But there might have been a second, more covert reason. Our military may already have had this information and was experimenting with it to develop new weapons of control and destruction.

Journalist Nick Cook recently published a book, "The Hunt for Zero Point," in which he claims that the United States has been seriously working on anti-gravity "electrogravitics" technology since the 1950s. The rash of UFO sightings that began in those years may well have been our own experimental aircraft. Such engines should lift and propel vehicles without the need for wings or thrust.

"I feel intuitively that some vehicle has been developed, particularly given that there is this wealth of scientific data out there, and the Americans have never been slow to pick up on this sort of science," Cook said in an interview with Reuters.

Cook, an aerospace consultant for Jane's Defense Weekly, said he uncovered evidence that German scientists during the war years, working under Hitler, had this information and were experimenting with anti-gravity devices. The Germans either heard about Searl's work, or pulled the information out of the collective consciousness, and began their own research.

Most recently, a company known as Transdimensional Technologies, claims to have patented and produced a device called Power 3 that defies gravity. The process is described as a rotor within a vacuum that creates a shift between bound ions and conduction electrons while in a particular medium. When operated under these conditions, the device floats due to what the company calls "a propellant-less propulsion system."

Not all of the flying disk-shaped objects in the world skies may be of Earth origin. There are now thousands of reports of sightings of circular-shaped space craft seen in the skies. While many may be of military origin, there is a strong theory that they come here from other worlds. Another idea is that may be time machines from the future.

It is interesting to think that these strange disk-shaped craft that have captured the imaginations of people all over the world for the last 50 years are glimpses of vehicles from the future. Perhaps like the old Jetson television cartoon character, we may all be scurrying around someday in private disks that defy gravity.

If it wasn't for the greed of big industry, and possibly the military's insistence on secrecy, we might already have these machines serving us. And we might not be faced with living on a dying planet.